Kimmage Defense Fund

The Missing Kimmage Defense Fund

Money donated for anti-doping advocate Paul Kimmage’s legal defense seems to have disappeared down a trail of tweets and broken promises

Joe Lindsey

The once prolific @UCI_Overlord has been silent since May 8.

Because they had modest goals and were both engaged in other jobs, the partnership was never formalized, says Cohen. “We talked about it as an equal partnership, and there was a handshake agreement,” and even that was virtual, since they hadn’t met in person. “I asked several times to put it in writing, spelling it out, but he would brush it off,” she recalls. “He’d say it wasn’t necessary.”

As the Overlord gained popularity, Pickens says, he noticed a change in Brown and at the café. Brown began spending most of his time online, even while working. “He would literally be at the cash register, on his computer and not paying attention to clients,” Pickens says. Employees began to complain about Brown’s behavior, and sometimes quit abruptly, but Pickens says he didn’t know why.

WHEN PICKENS ARRIVED in Girona, he did so with a number of guarantees by Brown: about how much he would work, about what he would do, and crucially, about how much he would be paid. Cohen, who declined to move to Girona, says Brown told her of these promises to Pickens.

The Girona gambit was the next major move for Cyclismas. The site and its main contributors, led by Brown, had become established commenters on the pro cycling scene—in particular, on the impact on the UCI of what became the United States Postal Service scandal.

Maybe it was the notion that the satirical Overlord Twitter handle represented the unrestrained id of the real Pat McQuaid. Or maybe it was the heady idea that social media spoke truth to power in a way that traditional journalism couldn’t or wouldn’t—a conceit explored by the New York Times’s David Carr last October. But times could hardly seem more promising for Brown or Cyclismas.

The high-water mark of the Overlord’s influence might have been the Kimmage Defense Fund. In January 2012, the UCI announced it would sue journalist Paul Kimmage, on behalf of McQuaid and former president Hein Verbruggen, for defamation.

After facing an initial round of generally outraged reaction, the case faded into the background until September, when the UCI finally went to court with a similar case filed in 2011 against Floyd Landis, and a December court date was announced for Kimmage.

The suit against Kimmage asked for 8,000 Swiss Francs in damages for each plaintiff and, if successful, would require the journalist to take out full-page ads at his expense in various international media publicizing the final judgment. It was money Kimmage, who had recently been let go from his sportswriter job at London’s Sunday Times, didn’t have.

In response, Cohen, Andy Shen of the website NYVelocity, and Karol Dillon, of the @Digger_forum Twitter account, decided in late September to start a legal defense fund for Kimmage. What happened next is crucial.

Shen, Brown, and Cohen all say that Dillon initially tried to start a ChipIn account for donations. Since Dillon lives in Ireland, as does Kimmage, that would have streamlined any international finance issues. But Dillon couldn’t get the PayPal account to activate. Shen, who had just run a ChipIn for medical expenses for journalist Charles Pelkey (who had been diagnosed with cancer), wasn’t interested in running another donation account so soon.

So with the clock ticking (donations had already started coming, but weren’t being processed due to Dillon’s PayPal issues), Cohen says, the task fell to her. “I used my cyclismas.com e-mail account, set up the ChipIn widget that people could embed on their websites, and did the press release.” The ChipIn directed donations to Cyclismas’s main PayPal account, the one Brown had created for the website’s then-meager finances.

Donations began pouring in; more than $23,000 came during the first week alone, says Cohen. By the time the fund closed, on December 31, close to $100,000 was in trust of Brown, the sole person in control of the Cyclismas PayPal account.

In hindsight, admits Cohen, it was a stupid choice not to set up a separate account for the fund. “I’m not a finance wizard, obviously,” she says. But while the PayPal account was associated with Cyclismas, Cohen says she didn’t think there was any money in it from the site; the T-shirt sales had netted a profit of a few hundred dollars, which Cohen says was used for Cyclismas cycling kits for the major contributors.

Despite receiving several unsolicited offers of help and advice about setting up non-profit accounts on PayPal, Cohen says she relied on Brown to handle things correctly. “Elden Nelson reached out to me,” she said of the blogger known as The Fat Cyclist, who directed campaigns that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer research, some of it for Livestrong. “But Aaron was totally anti-Lance and disdainful of the outreach. He said, ‘I have it under control.’” Brown pointed to his experience running the Bridgewater Century Ride, a charity event, for several years.